The Objects of Her Affection by Sonya Cobb

Author:Sonya Cobb
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.
Published: 2014-06-16T16:00:00+00:00

Twelve

After picking them up at the Cincinnati airport, Dan parked the minivan in the driveway and carried their luggage through the garage while Debbie gave them a tour of “The Stash”: shelves and shelves of spaghetti sauce, pineapple juice cocktail, potato flakes, soda bottles, whitening toothpaste, high-fiber cereal, cheese spray, antimicrobial sponges, mild salsa, Italian dressing, dryer sheets, and lemon juice.

“It’s like a store,” breathed Lucy, running her hand across a row of Gatorade bottles.

“And I only paid one hundred and twenty-seven dollars for the whole thing,” said Debbie. “Want to see where the magic happens?”

“Magic!” cried Elliot.

Debbie led them out of the garage and through the great room to her couponing office. They crowded around a table covered with newspapers, a paper cutter, several types of scissors, a computer, and a color printer. Against one wall, a bookshelf was filled with binders marked “no expire,” “no limit,” “BOGO,” and “Moneymakers.” Debbie showed them how she searched for coupons, categorized them, and compiled them in a binder for her monthly trip to the supermarket.

“You’ve really taken this to a new level,” Sophie said.

“All thanks to you!” Debbie said, squeezing Sophie’s hand. Sophie didn’t really see how she could take credit for all of it, but she squeezed Debbie’s hand back. Yes, she’d been the one to set up Debbie’s first computer, T1 line, and email address—nine years ago, when she and Brian had come to visit the newborn twins. Sophie remembered how they’d found Debbie, formerly a high-ranking product manager at Procter and Gamble, wandering the house with unwashed hair, her nursing bra permanently unfastened, a glazed look in her eyes. Sophie had hooked up the computer and introduced her to the nascent world of mommy blogs and Listservs, but it was Debbie who discovered the existence of coupon sites. Before long she was feeding her family, plus the beneficiaries of countless soup kitchens and food drives, for pennies on the dollar, and was helping others do the same with her exhaustively researched blog “Debbie Does Discounts.” All signs of depression had disappeared; on the contrary, Debbie now functioned on a higher level than most people.

Having finished the tour, their suitcases put away in the bonus room, Sophie and Brian flopped on the sectional in the great room, where Dan was flipping through sports channels. Lucy and Elliot, shy at first, had quickly discovered the pleasures of the vast carpeted space, the corpulent furniture, the large-screen TV, and the bottomless bowl of Goldfish crackers sitting on the low coffee table. They ran laps through the kitchen and great room, stopping periodically to examine the cathedral-ceiling-grazing tree (“seventy-five percent off at Costco last January”) and the extravagantly wrapped gifts already heaped beneath it.

Debbie added crab dip and Pepperoni Stix to the coffee table, and brought out cold beer in frosted mugs. “I got the kind you like,” she said to Brian, perching on the arm of the sectional next to him, “even though it wasn’t on sale, ha-ha.” She smiled broadly, shrugging her eyebrows.

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